Life Sketches

By Robert Bateman

Full of never-before-seen illustrations, Life Sketches is an inspiring and elegant portrait of Robert Bateman’s life as an artist and of his belief that “Nature is an infinite source of reason, imagination, and invention.”

From one of Canada’s most beloved painters comes an intimate, visually stunning memoir of the artist at work.

Internationally acclaimed artist Robert Bateman has brought the natural world to vivid life with his unique perspective. His vast body of work—spanning species as large as the buffalo and as small as the mouse—has touched millions of hearts and minds, awakening a reverence for wildlife of all kinds. Bateman is perhaps best known for his gorgeous depictions of birds in flight and in repose, images that stir in the viewer a deep appreciation of colour, form and spirit.

Life Sketches is a moving journey in both words and images that, for the first time, allows Bateman’s fans full access into his creative process, detailing his singular artistic vision and the inspiration behind his iconic art. What emerges is a portrait of a young boy enchanted by the natural world around him and called to record it in his sketches and paintings. Bitten by wanderlust, Bateman travelled the world and documented his real life experiences in journals, sketches, and paintings. In Life Sketches, he recounts the evolution of his style from abstraction to realism and the events that have shaped his art into a vocation over many decades. And through it all, Bateman shows how his keen sensibilities extend beyond art, to a passion for conservation and relentless advocacy for the natural world that underpins an incredible artistic legacy.

Join Robert Bateman on this personal guided tour through his life and art.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Release date: Nov 3, 2015
• ISBN: 9781476783024

Robert Bateman

Robert Bateman, OC, OBC is a Canadian naturalist and painter, born in Toronto, Ontario.

Book preview

I : THE RAVINE

As a painter, I rank green as one of my least favourite colours. But as a naturalist, I view green as soothing to the eye, especially that chlorophyll-laced green of the first leaves in spring. I liken this luminous lime-yellow colour, which the French call chartreuse, to a warm bath for the soul. And when I see that shade of green, I think of the ravine behind our Toronto house on Chaplin Crescent, in what was then the village of Forest Hill. The first forest I came to know, my own private woodland, my own The Wind in the Willows world.

Would I have become a painter and a naturalist had I not lived where I did as a boy? Hard to say, but that ravine enchanted me and drew me in from the time I could walk.

Imagine a day in May of 1940, when ten-year-old Bobbie Bateman descends the wooden steps at the back door of his family’s modest red-brick Georgian home, set on a regular city lot. He heads purposefully across the backyard, down the slanted lawn, past the rockery to a white picket fence and a rose arbour, and through his dad’s vegetable garden. He comes to a rudimentary wire fence, easily cleared over, fixed to a log retaining wall. Maybe the railroad company had constructed it to shore up the banks, protecting the rail line that runs down the centre of the ravine. Twice a day, a black steam engine chugs past with its freight-car loads of coal and ice and building supplies. The Belt Line Railway, as it was originally called at the end of the nineteenth century, was meant to link the old town of Toronto with the villages and communities sprouting on farmland to the north. Yet young Bob can imagine an Indian hunting party quietly stalking through these woods; the ecosystem remains much as it has been for centuries.

On the north side of the rail bed is a creek that massively overflows every spring, creating a body of water sizable enough to justify the building of a raft. The creek is home to water bugs and minnows, crayfish, pollywogs, frogs and painted turtles; the ravine, to foxes and skunks, raccoons and mice. There is the smell of damp earth, the ambrosia of composting leaves and pine needles, plus the fragrance of the blossoms of the plum tree that grows by a favourite solitary perch. The boy takes it all in. He can hear willows rustling in the breeze, insects stirring in the brush, the sound of water coursing. And the birds.

As a child, I regarded the birds as my neighbours and I was eager to learn their names. Before I was twelve, my parents had given me several bird books, including Roger Tory Peterson’s A Field Guide to the Birds of Eastern and Central North America and Birds of America, illustrated by Louis Agassiz Fuertes. I knew the calls, the colours and the place in the canopy preferred by particular predators and songbirds. In that ravine of mine (or so I considered it to be) were warblers, thrushes, flycatchers, Blue Jays and Baltimore Orioles, and at dawn, I would hear the squawk of pheasants. Especially in spring, when migration was in full swing, the ravine was a chorus of birds. I loved, and still love, that symphony.

The other book that I read and reread as a young boy was Ernest Thompson Seton’s Two Little Savages, whose subtitle says it all: Being the Adventures of Two Boys Who Lived as Indians, and What They Learned. Very early in the book, the narrator, a boy named Yan, describes his frequent visits to a nearby taxidermist’s shop. The boy gazes spellbound at the window display of some fifty birds, twelve of which are labelled. Osprey. Kingfisher. Blue Jay. Rose-breasted Grosbeak. Wood Thrush. Scarlet Tanager. Partridge or Ruffed Grouse. Bittern. Highholder. Saw-whet Owl. Oriole.

The boy thought it important to know the birds, their names and identifiers, and he saw that the taxidermist had erred in his labelling. The alleged Woodthrush was actually a Hermit Thrush. Furthermore, The last bird of the list was a long-tailed, brownish bird with a white breast. The label was placed so that Yan could not read it from outside, and one of his daily occupations was to see if the label had been turned so that he could read it. But it never was, so he never learned the bird’s name.

To Yan, it was sacrilegious not to know the names of the flora and fauna in his neck of the woods. My ten-year-old self shared that notion, though I had only a vague understanding of the concept of sacrilegious and certainly could not spell the word. I considered it my sacred duty to know, simply by the shape of the tail—rounded or square—whether the hawk circling overhead was a Sharp-shinned Hawk or a Cooper’s Hawk or a Red-tailed Hawk. To me, that detail, that particularity, mattered a great deal. And just like Ernest Thompson Seton, I capitalized each species of bird when I identified it, and still do.

MOST KIDS START DRAWING mammals and birds at three and quit before they’re ten. I never stopped. The habit of sketching the wildlife I was observing took hold when I was very young, and I remember having smallish brushes always at hand. Mom, in particular, saw my passion, and she actively encouraged me. One year, I presented her with a painting of a dignified Elk for Christmas. I had, of course, never seen a real Elk, but the pages of National Geographic offered a model, and for the landscape there were multiple sources: our own ravine, trees from a golf course, a photograph of a mountain for the background.

The focus of my art was most often the menagerie of pets in the household. There was a black cat called Shadow, so named because she was always following us around. If someone asked, we called our canine pets mongrels. There was a dog the same colour as a yellow lab we called Wink, and later, a Canadian farm collie cross called Ruff because of a shank of soft hair at the back of her neck.

Those were just the domesticated pets. I also had a pet crow (who went unnamed), a turtle called Buck, a raccoon known as Cooney, and two Screech Owls named Blink and Rombus. Owls, I knew even then, raise several young, but there’s usually a runt that gets sat upon and hen-pecked, and often there is not enough food for it. I found a nest containing four young, and I took the two smallest, telling myself that this was a rescue of sorts. I fed them mostly pieces of liver. I would hold one of the birds to my chest facing away from me, then force the lower beak open and use a toothpick to stuff a morsel of meat down its throat. I’d close its beak so it had no choice but to swallow the food. Later, I started mousetrapping and feeding whole mice to the owls. I knew that Screech Owls require bones and fur for calcium. Soon I was cutting up mice, frogs and grasshoppers as food for Blink and Rombus, and each time I fed them, I whistled in order to imprint on them the feeding like Pavlov’s dog. Eventually, they were on their own but came back to be fed for a few weeks when I whistled.

Years later, my friend Bristol Foster and I rescued another runt, a Short-eared Owl we named Howland, who was the object of many of my sketches. He lived in the basement of the Foster residence, a rather grand house, where Bristol’s parents looked after him for years. His mother was a dignified lady with a spark of mischief, and she would go to the top of the stairs and utter the scratchy owl call that Howland had come to recognize as the dinner bell. Howland would hop up the stairs and happily receive the mice she had for him. During dinner parties, the Fosters would set him on the fireplace mantel, next to the chinaware pheasant. More than one glass of sherry was spilled down a dress when someone spotted the owl, perfectly still to this point, rotating his head almost 360 degrees. Eventually, Howland was handed over to Toronto’s Riverdale Zoo, where he lived to a ripe old age.

Some rough sketches of my pet Screech Owls. The oily stain on the left is from a critter I was stuffing.

My buddies and I used to go looking for Saw-whet Owls, which are quite tame. You can grab them if you sneak up just right. This page from my sketchbook dates back to 1947, when I was seventeen.

We were free-range kids, virtually unsupervised. Across the tracks and up on the hill were the homes of the wealthy of Forest Hill, but their backyards held garden pools or smallish lawns that ended in fences. And where the fences stood guard, our world began. When the trees, bushes and shrubbery were in full foliage, the canopy was too dense on either side of the ravine to see through. Feral boys—Al Gordon, my younger brothers, Jack and Ross, and I—did what feral boys are wont to do. We made bonfires, roasted potatoes and jumped over the embers. On one occasion, when I was taking a run at the fire pit to make my leap, I caught my toes in an old page wire fence hidden in the leaves. I fell hands-first into the glowing coals. I remember my mother put my hands in cold water, then cold towels, and still the blisters rose like so much tapioca on the palms of both hands. Badges of honour.

BETWEEN 1939 AND 1945, from the time I was nine until my fifteenth birthday, the war shaped our play. My family listened to CBC Radio, and I remember hearing Lorne Greene, The Voice of Doom, as he came to be called for his rich baritone, delivering details of the disaster that was the Dieppe raid in 1942. Before that, on December 7, 1941, we had heard the Edgar Bergen/Charlie McCarthy radio show interrupted by news of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Fortunately, the horrors of the war never touched my close family, and we boys innocently incorporated its drama into our make-believe ravine battles.

We built forts, and not just because of the war. We had a legendary, almost mythical enemy—a group of boys called the Gilgorm Gang for the street they lived on to the north of us. They were a rough-and-tumble counter to our bunch. We were budding birders and naturalists who played at soldiers but were pacifists at heart. Down the rail track was a dump that we plundered for building material such as plywood to make a roof for our ground fort. We dug into the hillside and loaded up on ammo—old shoes from the dump, plus paper bags full of the fine powdery ash from our fire pit. These were mortars to be launched at imaginary foes. Boys love an enemy, for enemies bring excitement and dopamine. We never imagined that the Gilgorm Gang would actually attack. One day, we heard angry voices approaching along the tracks, but we hoped the boys would pass us by or not see us. Nothing was said, by them or by us, when the Gilgorm Gang spotted our fort, demolished it, and then went back the way they had come. We, of course, could not handle a violent encounter, so we sat passively to one side and watched. They thankfully ignored us.

A SINGLE EVENT IN CHILDHOOD can shape a life, and that was the case with an episode that affected all three Bateman brothers, especially the youngest, Ross. I was perhaps twelve, Jack nine and Ross six when a young House Sparrow landed on the lawn behind the house. What Ross remembers is that Al Gordon and I had been downgrading sparrows and starlings as invasive pests, which might have precipitated what happened. As many kids in those days, we owned a BB gun, the classic Red Ryder model that had long been advertised on the back pages of comic books. My parents had set down certain rules about the gun: Use it for target practice only and engage common sense.

Never imagining that he would actually hit the bird, Ross took a shot and struck the poor creature in the eye with one of the round brass pellets. I remember telling my brother, Ross, finish it! There were tears flowing down his cheeks when he finally did end the bird’s suffering. My mother got involved, and she, too, was horrified. Looking back, I can see that, as the older brother, I should have taken matters into my own hands, but I did not relish the prospect of killing the bird either. We were all traumatized by what we witnessed.

The Walt Disney film Bambi had come out that year, 1942, and we had gone to see it as a family. There is a scene in the film in which the animals flee in terror, and when all is quiet and safe once more, Bambi asks his mother why they had run. She replies, Man was in the forest. Ross, just six, looked on in horror, uttered an Oh no! under his breath and fled the theatre, with my mother chasing after him.

Ross was utterly changed by that incident with the young bird and by seeing that film. He would grow up to become an ardent conservationist and social activist, fighting to protect Carolinian trees, natural habitat and heritage buildings, among many other things. He has always felt that man in the forest creates problems.

Bambi and its creator, Walt Disney, also had a huge impact on me as I continued to paint. Disney’s artists were incredibly skilled at capturing the way animals move, and that impressed me. Beyond that, however, the characters of this animated dram—Bambi, Thumper, Flower and the rest—entered the public consciousness. By the time I was sixteen, I was almost mass-producing 6x 6 paintings of these characters for the baby rooms of my mother’s friends. A popular rendering was Thumper by a pool, looking over Bambi’s shoulder, with mushrooms at his feet.

But I was a typical jaundiced teen, and I would surreptitiously insert an evil eye into one of the toadstools or show a Grim Reaper figure reflected in the pool. No mother ever complained, and no baby was ever frightened, as far as I’m aware. Now and again, at a book signing or an exhibition, a grey-haired lady will introduce herself as an old friend of Annie Bateman, and from her bag she will pluck one of my paintings of Bambi or Thumper or Flower. I cringe, but a part of me is at peace with my sentimental past.

IF THE RAVINE WAS CENTRAL to my childhood, so, too, was a little cottage some 200 kilometres northeast of Toronto, to which the Bateman family travelled every summer starting in 1938. Al Gordon’s parents knew Lake Boshkung (an Iroquois word that means, depending on which source you believe, place of grassy narrows, meeting of the waters or place of rest) and had recommended it. There, in the Haliburton Highlands, a second, very different landscape entered my consciousness.

The ravine behind our house in the city seemed to me wild and tangled and completely ours. The banks were steep, and in some places the giant willows in high summer were almost impenetrable. This ravine connected with others in the city, a ribbon of nature that led to the Don and Humber River valleys, promising almost limitless possibilities. But the truth was that an athlete with a good arm could throw a baseball from our backyard on Chaplin Crescent and hit one of the imposing Forest Hill houses on the other side, the area was that narrow and confined.

The land around the cottage, in contrast, offered wide open play space. The first year, we occupied a little hilltop cottage called Wildwood, but the next we rented a newly built unit, one of three closer to the lake. When I think of the early days at Boshkung Lake, this is the cottage I recall. Adjacent to it was a working farm with several hundred acres of pasture and all the animals then common on mixed farms: horses (plough horses named King and Queen), a cow, sheep, pigs, geese and a flock of black and white chickens. The Bateman brothers, pals Al Gordon, Don Smith, and Jack and Don Lowery, whose parents rented cottages alongside ours, had the run of the place. That farm had a deep influence on me.

I remember watching the farmer milk a cow by hand, aiming a squirt of warm milk into a cat’s mouth. I remember seeing chickens slaughtered, hanging by their feet and bled from the throat with a small but very sharp penknife. We watched the sheep being sheared and, when their time came, bled with a small butcher knife. The highlight of the summer was haying time, when we were encouraged to ride on the horse-drawn wagon and help the hired hands —or at least to try to stay out of the way. In the barn, ropes hung from the rafters, and we would swing like pirates and drop into the loose hay piled thickly below.

That barn, the surrounding pastures, the lovely sandy bay on Boshkung Lake, ringed by aspen, spruce and the odd white pine (then and still my favourite tree), was our playground. There were very few cottages on the lake, which lent it a pristine quality. The water was clear and pure, and we often watched as loons and Mergansers paraded past the dock with their young. And just as we did in the ravine, we built forts— first of bracken and then out of fallen logs. We played cowboys and Indians and commandos, and raided one another’s bastions. We made balsam beds in the style prescribed by Ernest Thompson Seton, and sometimes even slept in them. Because there was no electricity on the farm or in the cottage, there was no noise other than the sounds of animals, both domestic and wild. And the birds, of course.

In the evenings, my mother read us bedtime stories by the light of a coal-oil lamp. Often the selection was from Ivan T. Sanderson, a Scottish biologist who produced such classics of nature writing as Animal Treasure (an account of his expedition into the jungles of West Africa) and my favourite, Living Treasure (about similar treks in Jamaica, British Honduras and the Yucatan).

The landowner, Clayton Rogers, who would later become reeve of the township, had built several cottages on the bay and called his little enterprise Moorefield Acres, after the original owner of the property. It wasn’t just that Mr. Rogers possessed an entrepreneurial bent, though he did. It was more the case that by itself, farming in the Haliburton Highlands offered too meagre a return to support a family. He was then the virtual laird of this land, owning the entire south shore of Boshkung Lake and the hills beyond. You’d think he’d have been pleased when, many years later, I did my honours geography thesis at the University of Toronto on the future of the township (then called Stanhope, now called Algonquin Highlands). My conclusion was that the future of the township lay in tourism, but Mr. Rogers was none too pleased to hear this, for he thought the place deserved a grander fate, perhaps a more industrial one.

Every July during 1938 to 1945, when we lived at the cottage, we were in heaven. There was gas rationing in those days, and Dad had just enough fuel to drive up Highway 35, then a dirt road, and drop us off before returning to Toronto and his job at Canadian General Electric. Commuting was out of the question. Groceries meant a major walk or a row through Little Boshkung and Twelve Mile Lake to Mr. Rogers’ General Store in Carnarvon, though I remember an itinerant truck with red wooden panels driving up to the barn with supplies. When the truck didn’t stop by with bread, my mom or her sisters or her mother would bake it. And if we boys gathered small pails of wild raspberries, we got a pie out of the deal. Go up over the hills, Mom would say, for that’s where the berries were.

The conveniences at the cottage were few—except for a coal-oil lamp—but that only made the place feel more exotic. Instead of a flushing toilet, there was an outhouse behind the cottage. We hauled drinking water a pail at a time, using a hand pump located over a